


it was a beast of a burden

by griffenly



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-24
Updated: 2015-05-24
Packaged: 2018-03-31 23:35:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3997444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/griffenly/pseuds/griffenly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The scene that should have been. (In light of Rothenberg's tweet about Bellamy and Clarke having already discussed the events of MW.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	it was a beast of a burden

Eight hours. It was an eight hour journey from the death trap of a mountain back… back to whatever the Ark was, at that point. Clarke couldn’t feel her hands or her feet and air was having an exceptionally difficult time entering her lungs, and yet somehow she kept trudging forward, putting one foot in front of the other, and she pretended it wasn’t because Bellamy was next to her, again, and that breathing was easier because of it. 

(She failed.) 

(He was alive alive alive, and she used that mantra as the beat to which she walked.) 

They stopped to rest at about the halfway point, and Clarke collapsed against a tree and massaged the bridge of her nose, pulling her knees into her chest. Bellamy sat beside her, quiet. Her body and her heart and her everything ached, and all she could see were hundreds of broken bodies littering the floor like scorched rose petals. All she could hear was Maya’s voice, cracking and utterly defeated, as she whispered that no one was innocent. (Clarke wasn’t. More than anyone, she sure as hell wasn’t.) 

It was his voice that inevitably broke the tense silence. 

“She… She saved my life, you know,” he mumbled, and she vaguely wondered how he had known she was thinking about Maya, but this was Bellamy and he knew her better than she knew herself, most days. “I… When we got there, to the mountain… I was taken in. By that batshit crazy doctor.” Clarke turned her head slowly to look at him, saw his own eyes transfixed on a point straight ahead, his jaw clenched, and she thought she might explode from the anger and fear coursing through her veins. 

“They…” He trailed off, as though trying to find the words, needing to find them, and yet they were on the edge of his tongue, just out of reach. He swallowed. “You told me you saw the Grounders, right? What they did to them?” Clarke nodded, slowly, and she dug her nails into her palms to keep from clawing at her own face. (You did this. You did this. You.) 

“They did it to me, too,” he muttered, but his voice broke on the last syllable, and it sounded the same way her heart did as it shattered into two, sounded like a gunshot blazing through the command center of the mountain and the opening of the doors that welcomed in death like an old friend. 

(You did this.) 

(No one is innocent.) 

“Bellamy…” she began, her own voice betraying her, and it was only then that he looked at her, really looked at her, and his dark eyes were so haunted that she could practically see the ghosts swarming them, the memories that dug their talons into his mind and wouldn’t let go. 

“I don’t blame you,” he said, and he was firm, his eyes never leaving hers. “I wanted to go, remember? And… and it had to be done.” (Words he had said once before, the first time she’d left him to die, an echo of a past life.) 

“No, it didn’t, and-”

“Clarke.” He raised an eyebrow, as if daring her to contradict him. “We got our people home.” Bellamy sighed, then, looking out at the remnants of the 100, at a people now bruised and bloodied and at those who now flinched at the sharpest noise and recoiled from human touch. A broken people. “We bear it, so they don’t have to, right?“ 

(No one is innocent.) 

(You did this.) 

(It wasn’t worth the risk.) 

She didn’t answer him. She simply swallowed thickly, rising to her feet as Kane signaled for them to keep moving, and for the next four hours those words were on a loop in her head, and she made a decision. 

You’ve borne enough, Bellamy. Now it’s my turn. 

(She lifted part of the weight from Atlas’ back, and shouldered it onto her own, making the trade. A life for a life.) 

She wasn’t innocent.


End file.
